Sharon Tate Never Wanted to Be an Object. That's Exactly What Happened in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

When Quentin Tarantino announced his plans in 2017 to make a film that involved the Manson Family's murder of actress Sharon Tate, it promised a chance to tell the wrenching story of a complex woman whose gruesome death has gripped popular culture for decades. In promotional materials for the film, Margot Robbie’s Tate is billed prominently, suggesting that even as Tarantino populated the landscape with additional characters, she would be an equal participant in her own story.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is seen as a triumph for Tarantino. It marks the director’s biggest box-office opening, raking in more than $40 million last weekend, as well as the summer’s first hit that isn’t a franchise or a remake. The movie also opened to mostly glowing reviews. After its debut at Cannes in May, Esquire praised the film, comparing it to a “Shakespearian masterpiece.” In a separate article ranking all of Tarantino's movies, Esquire said it was his best in a decade. And yet, I cannot ignore the way Once Upon a Time in Hollywood portrays women, particularly its female protagonist. The film underserves Tate, delivering a story about two fictional has-beens in which she is nothing more than a sexualized cipher.

Andrew Cooper

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, DiCaprio stars as Rick Dalton, a B-list actor of spaghetti Westerns and pulpy procedurals forced to reckon with his own mid-career mediocrity. Brad Pitt appears as Cliff Booth, Rick’s longtime stunt double and gofer, who takes a breezy pleasure in pushing the envelope everywhere he goes. Set in the backlots of Hollywood circa 1969, a cultural moment about to be rocked by the Tate murders, the film reduces Tate to a mute sex object and bit player within her own story. Tate dances seductively in her bedroom, gyrates in a crop top at a Playboy mansion party, and smiles coquettishly while watching a screening of her film at a local theater. Robbie does her level best with the dozen or so lines she’s given over almost three hours, but Tarantino’s Tate is nothing more than a silent, tragic vixen, devoid of any interiority or character arc.

The real Tate was more than a sex symbol or a victim—she was an army brat turned pageant queen who freely mocked her "sexpot" persona, a woman known among her loved ones as a sensitive and compassionate person. Speaking in an interview about the extreme degree to which old men control Hollywood, she once said, "They’re certain that to entertain the public, you just have to create a blonde star with shiny lips, rounded hips, and no brain.” In multiple interviews in the mid-'60s Tate spoke about how she had no interest in being a sex object. In one interview with Look Magazine in 1967, she said, "When I was put under contract, I thought, 'Oh, how nice,' but... I was just a piece of merchandise. No one cared about me, Sharon. People expect so much of an attractive person."

Although Tate's sister, Debra Tate, has praised Robbie's performance in the film, telling Vanity Fair that she was reduced to tears while watching, the character who appears in Once Upon a Time more closely mirrors Sharon Tate's own criticism of Hollywood in the ‘60s. Unfortunately, in this film, Tarantino did not locate the same level of dynamism and character in a real, multifaceted woman as he did in two fictional men. (At Cannes, a New York Times reporter asked Tarantino about Robbie’s diminished role. His response: "I reject your hypothesis.")

Sharon Tate in 1968.

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Ultimately, Tarantino does Tate a disservice in underwriting and sexualizing her, all while doing the same to the rest of the women who populate this film. When it comes to the women of the Manson family, Tarantino portrays them alternately as frisky, kittenish young things, unwashed hippies, or colossal buffoons. In fact, the only dynamic female character in this film is the young actress Rick encounters on the set of a Western, a tough, no-nonsense 10-year-old who's serious about her craft and about professionalism.

Take, for example, Kill Bill’s Beatrix Kiddo, who is put into a coma by her former assassin squad and raped while comatose, or The Hateful Eight’s Daisy Domergue, who is beaten black and blue throughout the course of the film—and even vomited on. These films are not about what women do, but about what’s done to them. To be raped and beaten is not empowering, nor is it entertaining. These are not feminist films—they are revenge fantasies that fetishize abuse and view it as an expedient device to build character.

Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

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In the climax of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, three armed members of the Manson Family break into Rick’s home, seeking to exact revenge on the Hollywood machine that deluded them by murdering one if its representatives. In a textbook Tarantino melee, Cliff makes quick work of the intruders, seizing the two young women by their hair to slam them face first into glass frames, wooden coffee tables, and a stone fireplace. The violence is staggering and brutal. As the scene progresses, Cliff’s pit bull maims the women, sending one of them staggering into the backyard, where Rick lays into her with a flamethrower.

We’re meant to laugh and cheer, as if these women are receiving their comeuppance for having the nerve to break into Rick's home, yet for me, there’s nothing funny here—in fact, the scene shows a fundamental lack of empathy for women. These young women arrived at Rick’s doorstep only through their radicalization by a dangerous predator—a man who used sex and power to exploit them into committing violent crimes. To see them maimed and brutalized in this moment is to see them victimized by men a second time over. To argue as some do that Tarantino brutalizes men to the same degree he does women is to put your head in the sand, to divorce these films from cultural context. Indeed men are tortured and murdered throughout Tarantino’s filmography, but men as a demographic are not persecuted by gendered violence as women around the world are. Sexual and intimate violence against women is a global epidemic, with UN Women reporting that 35 percent of women worldwide have suffered sexual violence by a non-partner, whereas up to 70 percent of women have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of an intimate partner. And 137 women around the world are killed by a member of their own family every day. Men are not tortured and murdered because they are men, yet every day, women are tortured and murdered because they are women.To argue that Tarantino’s violence against women is counterbalanced by his violence against men is “both sides”-ism at its finest—it fails to acknowledge how violence against women is much more freighted than violence against men.

Also played for laughs: the matter of Cliff’s wife. Rumors swirl around Hollywood that Cliff killed his wife and got away with the crime, leading to a brief flashback in which we see Cliff and his nameless wife on a boat. She is depicted as a drunk, intolerable nag, and as she rails at Cliff, he glances meaningfully at the harpoon in his hands. We’re meant to erupt in laughter at the implication here, as if a harpoon to the chest is a fair punishment for nagging (a charge only ever levied at women). Here lies the truth of how Tarantino differentiates violence between the genders: with women, it’s either a raison d’être or a punchline.

At their best, Tarantino’s films are a celebration of cinema, films that reference both the worlds he’s created on screen and the movies that influenced them. His films remain—despite controversy—widely influential pieces of American film. Seen another way, they're simply an avenue through which to fetishize violence against women. The making of art should never exploit others, yet that’s exactly the insidious outcome of these films. Only when women are respected as equals will we have agency over our own stories—until then, we'll all just be dancing like Sharon Tate in a man's fantasy of our lives.

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